This is the first time I've read this book since high school, and I'm a bit irritated with that teacher right now. Why was "Ethan Frome" chosen as assigned reading? The story is grim, and its grown-up themes of adultery and morality didn't mean much to me, other than to make me think I disliked Edith Wharton as a writer.

Which is why I am complaining decades later about this high school assignment. Because now I know that Edith Wharton is a marvelous writer — truly one of my favorite American authors — but for years I walked around thinking I disliked her work because of this negative early exposure.

So when I saw that the library had an audio version of "Ethan Frome," I decided to give it a reread and see if my adult self appreciated it more. I did like it better, although it is still a dark tale.

This reminds me that I still need to reread "The Scarlet Letter" and see if I like that any better as an adult.

I have been on a bit of a four-star roll recently and am beginning to fear that I accidentally pressed against my generous ratings button when I was slumped against the bookcase last week trying to figure out what to read next. It's cold and dreary outside and I was seeking something warm and fuzzy, maybe a bit light hearted or some sort of serial fantasy to see me through the onset of the winter months.... and then my hand brushed by the spine of Ethan Frome...

Which is clearly none of the things I was looking for but I picked it up and read it anyway and so here we are. I actually managed to finish it in one day thanks to the relentlessly long commute to the office which was made even longer by the delay on the return leg when the train in front hit "something". To quote the train driver who made the announcement, "We are delayed due to a collision with an object on the track. At this stage we are hoping it is inanimate." I'm pretty sure most things are inanimate after being hit by a train but there we go.

MISERY

Ethan Frome is a book about chance and misery. Specifically the chances that Ethan Frome had and the misery he subsequently endured because of them. You won't find much happiness here and the relationship between Ethan and his wife Zenobia "Zeena" Frome is a crispy and glacial as a winter in Starkfield , where the novella is set, although on the plus side this then makes the current temperatures here in Liverpool seem positively tropical. A loveless marriage to an ailing wife and back breaking work on a profitless few acres of farm land have transformed Ethan Frome into an old man at the age of 28. Wharton characterises him in such a way that you immediately imagine someone much older. Like Father Time.

DOGS BOTTOM

The Frome fortunes change when Mattie arrives at the farm. Ethan's heart starts to defrost and that is when the trouble starts. Old Mrs Frome might be an ailing hypochondriac with a face as puckered as a dogs bottom, but she's got two eyes in her head and make no mistake about it. And what she sees is her husband developing an attachment to the hired help. From this point forward there is a swathe of eye lash fluttering, breathless outdoor encounters of the non coital kind and lots of blushing across the kitchen table or the milk pan or the barn door and wherever else country folks go to do their blushing. Of course you know it will all come to a sticky end so don't read on if the lover's final act is still unknown to you.

DEATH BY SLED

Not for Ms Wharton the conventional drinking of poison, trapped and drowning beneath the ice on a frozen New England pond, or shot gun to the temple. You've got two lovers ready to make the ultimate leap together and a lot of snow. Snow plus suicide = sled, obviously. There has been much scoffing at the this method of delivering an untimely demise to the protagonist, and yes, I may be scoffing a tiny bit too. On the other hand I have been on this kind of sled and actually took one down the black ski run on a mountain in Austria once. One of the guys I was with planted his sled half way up a tree and broke his arm. The other guy went off a cliff. Not a massive cliff admittedly but big enough to probably ensure a little bit of wee came out. So death by sled is entirely probable, just more difficult to successfully engineer and a little more uncommon these days.

LOVE THE ONE YOU'RE WITH
It turns out that death by sled really isn't easy at all and even seasoned sled driver Ethan fails to pull it off leaving Ethan, Mattie and Zeena locked together on the Frome farm each nursing their own ailments and bitter disfigurements as well as being the talk of the local town and, within the framework of the story, the subject of intrigue whenever a nosey newcomer arrives in town.

If it sounds like I didn't enjoy this, then don't be fooled because I really did. Wonderfully written, beautiful descriptions of the Massachusetts landscape and all in one novella sized package. I've now downloaded the rest of the Wharton back catalogue so expect an onslaught of all things Edith soon.

* Spoilers follow*
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.



This is a romantic tragedy that culminates in a sledding accident. I will just say a few brief words about that. First, there is probably a reason that sledding accidents don't figure more prominently in tragedies. Shakespeare wrote like 13 tragedies and to the best of my knowledge none featured a sledding accident (I have not read Titus Andronicus, so I can't be sure). If Shakespeare doesn't need to include a sled wreck, then neither do you.

I will also say that I found Ethan and Mattie's attempted double suicide by sledding a little hard to take seriously. I mean, there are probably dozens of reasons that serious people don't rank sled-tree collisions on their Top 5 List of preferred suicide methods, but certainly the fact that adult doubles sledding is inherently ridiculous is one. Another that springs to mind is the unreliability of trying to kill yourself by sledding into a tree. Ethan ends up breaking his legs and paralyzing Mattie, which is pretty much the best you can realistically hope to do if you sled into a tree.

Really, I find it remarkable that Edith Wharton's reputation survived Ethan Frome and his sled antics. It makes me want to read House of Mirth, because it must be REALLY REALLY good.

As a side note, this is *exactly* the kind of ridiculous melodramatic bullshit I always had to read in high school. Teachers getting all worked up about the symbolism of the New England winter and failing to understand why 16-year-olds don't respond to the tragedy of star-crossed lovers doubling each other into a tree on a sled. Please.

In the bleak setting of 1880's Starkfield, appropriately named, (Lenox, western Massachusetts) where it always seems like perpetual winter, and its cold, dark, gloomy, ambiance, a poor, uneasy farmer, Ethan Frome, 28, is all alone, his mother has just died, the woman who took good care of her, Zenobia (Zeena) Pierce, is about to leave, though seven years junior to the lady, he purposes, she accepts gladly and the biggest mistake he believes, of his life, occurs. Zeena, not a beauty, likes nursing sick people, the capable woman knows what to do, unlike the hapless Frome, but soon develops a strange illness herself, while idle, seeing many doctors, they tell her what she wants to hear, given some pills, advice and then off to another one. The hypochondriac continues this ceaseless pattern, Ethan becomes quite disillusioned, after only a year of marriage, Zeena's, physicians prescribe that she get a maid, to help with the hard, tiresome housework, which is ludicrous, since her husband does most of it...Yet the struggling farmer, not the best around, has troubles of his own, a deteriorating, old house, that frequent blizzards, cause much damage to, a failing, lumber mill, also, and the new expenses... he reluctantly agrees, though, Mattie Silver, Zeena's petite cousin arrives, with no close family left, she is healthy, cheerful, lively and yes, pretty, Mr. Frome, a lonely man, falls in love, but naturally keeps it a deep secret, his sour, silent wife lives in another world and does not notice. He begins to daydream, neglects his not prosperous farm and negligible mill, thinking about pleasant thoughts, their few walks and rides together... bliss. Does Mattie, not the best maid, either, rather more a dreamer, like Ethan, love him too, the possibilities are endless, thinks he, can they dare run away together, to the western frontier, forget the people they abandoned and live only for themselves? The triangle if it exists, will have winners and losers, but Ethan must find out quickly how Mattie feels, a new woman is coming to replace Miss Silver, at the insistence of the unpleasant Zeena, the crises looms, decisions have to be made now, the scared girl has no place to live...An uncommonly captivating story of love, ( but not for all, the narrative can be difficult to digest) responsibility, and propriety, in an age that demands this from everyone, scandals are not tolerated by society, all must know the rules, the few who brake them are ostracized in perpetuity...

This year I'm doing a Reading Challenge; so I have 26 books with specific subjects that I need to read.
Book 3: A book over 100 years

Eathan Frome was first published in 1911 (106 years ago)


Every time I read a classic it's like I'm reading a true story; a bit of history being shared.
I love the old English and the composition of sentences that just paints a picture that leaves you awestruck.

This was my first acquaintance with Eadith Warton and it truly was a pleasurable one. Even-though the book is very predictable and straight forward, it was still a pretty piece of work.



The topic is something so everyday that you can't help find solace in it. The feelings is so vivid, you can't help feeling them. The characters so real, you can't help thinking that somewhere out there at this very moment someone is feeling that exact emotions.

They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars.

The perfect soundtrack for this novel: "I Need My Girl" by The National.

Wow, I'm speechless. It's ten past midnight and I just couldn't go to sleep without finishing this story. Don't let its size fool you, every page of this book is full of raw emotion that will leave you feeling heavy and achy all over. The writing is so elegant and the prose, every word, every phrase was thoughtfully placed and had significance. Oh I just can't praise Edith Wharton enough. This is arguably the best book I've read so far in 2016.

For more bookish photos, reviews and updates follow me on instagram @concerningnovels.

It is a novel to despair of love, pessimistic, where selfishness and conventions are predominant. It is a novel where the silences speak louder than the words.
That's a closed door where Edith Wharton, between the lines, seems to denounce her time's customs and social conditions with her precise writing.
It takes us into literature from another age, where talent was a necessary preamble to writing.

This is my third read of Edith Wharton, and in all three one common thing can be detected - social commentary. It looks that the author was a strong believer in the independence and freedom of men and women from the stringent social conventions prevalent at her time. Whatever the class she chooses to set her story in, she has carefully observed, irrespective of the sex, the people's struggle trying to balance their lives between social convention, duty, honour and following their own hearts.

Ethan Frome is yet another effort by Ms. Wharton to show the tragedies which follow when the balance they try to achieve is impaired. In this depressing story, Ms. Wharton brings out three characters - Ethan, Zeena, and Mattie to paint the picture of the rough life of the rural working class, the suffering of a man in a loveless union as well as women's pitiful plight in the hand of dependency.

With her sensitive writing, she weaves a tragic tale of Ethan Frome, whose vision in life is lost by circumstances, who endlessly suffer in a loveless union, who is torn between duty, honour, and passion, and who labours pitifully at the hand of poverty. From the outset, Ethan is a victim. Zeena, the older wife of Ethan seems to be the villain with her shrewd and subtly manipulative nature. Mattie was yet again a victim; wrapped in layers of poverty and in the absence of any skill to establish her independence, her only hope is in the charity of a relative. Her only sin is to fall in love with the one man who shows her kindness. But this character analysis undergoes a surprising twist in the end leaving you questioning whether you fully understood them.

Although conceptually good, I wasn't much impressed with the storyline in which it was developed. The characters felt nothing to me. They didn't generate any emotion. There was an artificial touch to the whole thing. Perhaps, it might have been due to my having expected too much or perhaps, because of the comparison with her much loved work The Age of Innocence (which I loved). Whatever the reason, I was disappointed. If not for Wharton's beautiful writing, it would have been quite a task to push through it.

Haunting, tragic tale of forbidden love

I didn’t happen to read this during my school days, but caught up in 2006 or 2008, I think, and was impressed with this condensed tragedy and the ambiance of a harsh New England winter. It struck me even more on a reread as a flawless parable of a man imprisoned by circumstance and punished for wanting more.

I had forgotten that the novella is presented as a part-imagined reconstruction of the sad events of Ethan Frome’s earlier life. A quarter-century later, the unnamed narrator is in Wharton’s fictional Starkfield, Massachusetts on business, and hears the bare bones of Ethan’s story from various villagers before meeting the man himself. Ethan, who owns a struggling sawmill, picks up extra money from odd jobs. He agrees to chauffeur the narrator to engineering projects in his sleigh, and can’t conceal his jealousy at a technical career full of travel – a reminder of what could have been had he been able to continue his own scientific studies. A blizzard forces the narrator to stay overnight in Ethan’s home, and the step over the threshold sends readers back in time to when Ethan was a young man of 28.

Spoiler-y discusson: Ethan’s household contains two very different women: his invalid wife, Zeena, eight years his elder; and her cousin, Mattie Silver, who serves as her companion and housekeeper. Mattie is dreamy and scatter-brained – not the practical sort you’d want in a carer role, but she had nowhere else to go after her parents’ death. She has become the light of Ethan’s life. By contrast, Zeena is shrewish, selfish, lazy and gluttonous. Wharton portrays her as either pretending or exaggerating about her chronic illness. Zeena has noticed that Ethan has taken extra pains with his appearance in the year since Mattie came to live with them, and conspires to get rid of Mattie by getting a new doctor to ‘prescribe’ her a full-time servant.

The plot turns on an amusing prop, “Aunt Philura Maple’s pickle-dish.” While Zeena is away for her consultation with Dr. Buck, Ethan and Mattie get one evening alone together. Mattie lays the table nicely with Zeena’s best dishes from the china cabinet, but at the end of their meal the naughty cat gets onto the table and knocks the red glass pickle dish to the floor, where it smashes. Before Ethan can obtain glue to repair it in secret, Zeena notices and acts as if this never-used dish was her most prized possession. She and Ethan are both to have what they most love taken away from them – but at least Ethan’s is a human being.

I had remembered that Ethan fell in love with a cousin (though I thought it was his cousin) and that there is a dramatic sledding accident. What I did not remember, however, was that the crash is deliberate: knowing they can never act on their love for each other, Mattie begs Ethan to steer them straight into the elm tree mentioned twice earlier. He dutifully does so. I thought I recalled that Mattie dies, while he has to live out his grief ever more. I was gearing myself up to rail against the lingering Victorian mores of the time that required the would-be sexually transgressing female to face the greatest penalty. Instead, in the last handful of pages, Wharton delivers a surprise. When the narrator enters the Frome household, he meets two women. One is chair-bound and sour; the other, tall and capable, bustles about getting dinner ready. The big reveal, and horrible irony, is that the disabled woman is Mattie, made bitter by suffering, while Zeena rose to the challenges of caregiving.

Ethan is a Job-like figure who lost everything that mattered most to him, including his hopes for the future. Unlike the biblical character, though, he finds no later reward. “Sickness and trouble: that’s what Ethan’s had his plate full up with, ever since the very first helping,” as one of the villagers tells the narrator. “He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!” the narrator observes. This man of sorrow is somehow still admirable: he and Zeena did the right thing in taking Mattie in again, and even when at his most desperate Ethan refused to swindle his customers to fund an escape with Mattie. In the end, Mattie’s situation is almost the hardest to bear: she only ever represented sweetness and love, and has the toughest lot. In some world literature, e.g. the Russian masters, suicide might be rendered noble, but here its attempt warrants punishment.

I can see why some readers, especially if encountering this in a classroom setting, would be turned off by the bleak picture of how the universe works. But I love me a good classical tragedy, and admired this one for its neat construction, its clever use of foreshadowing and dread, its exploration of ironies, and its use of a rustic New England setting – so much more accessible than Wharton’s usual New York City high society. The cozy wintry atmosphere of Little Women cedes to something darker and more oppressive; “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters,” a neighbor observes of Ethan. I could see a straight line from Jude the Obscure through Ethan Frome to The Great Gatsby: three stories of an ordinary, poor man who pays the price for grasping for more. I reread this in two sittings yesterday morning and it felt to me like a perfect example of how literature can encapsulate the human condition.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

Koks gražus ir koks tyliai liūdnas pasakojimas. Apie didelę meilę, didelę neteisybę, didelį orumą, susitaikymą, žmogiškumą, nedrąsia svajonę, nedrąsią mintį, tylų įsijautimą ir kelis visiškai sudužusius likimus. Daug iš knygos tikėjaus, daug ir gavau. Maža, plona, bet nė vieno nereikalingo žodžio. Toks jausmas, kad Wharton Fromo rankraštį tol trumpino, kol paliko tik pačią pačią esmę, pačiais giliausiais ir paveikiausiais sakiniais. t
t
Itanas Fromas gyvena nemeilėje su savo žmona Zena. Pastaroji nuolat kažką gydosi, nuolat skundžiasi, nuolat sau išsigalvoja sveikatos bėdas ir brangius jų gydymo būdus. Itanas, tuo tarpu, lenkia nugarą dvilinkas, kad nuolat į kapus besirengainti žmona mažiau skųstųsi. Lygiai dėl tų pačių skundų, į jų namus pagyventi ir buity padėti atsikrausto jaunutė jos giminaitė Metė. Kantri, darbšti, gyvenimu besidžiaugianti Metė tampa Itano akių šviesa ir širdies atgaiva. Tik tos minutės kai ją mato ar girdi padeda susitaikyti su nedėkingu likimu, tik Metė jam reiškia džiaugsmą ir atokvėpį nuo realybės.


Knyga neliūdina tavęs akivaizdžiais dalykais: slogutį ir išeičių neturinčių pagrindinių veikėjų skausmą pajauti per nutylėjimus, žvilgsnius, piktus dialogus su ktais personažais ir tiesiog bendroje knygos atmosferoje. Tiek Itanas, tiek Metė tokie geri, tokie žmogiški ir nelaimingi, kad tampa beprotiškai lengva jiems pajaust simpatiją ir atjautą.Kaip gražiai knygoje parinkti žodžiai, kaip jausmingai, bet be didelių ditirambų dėliojami sielon smingantys liūdni sakiniai ir jais apipinama neišvengimai nelaiminga meilės istorija. Nuostabus vertimas. Perskaičiau vienu sykiu ir dvejopi jausmai liko: liūdna, skauda, bet taip gražu, taip tikra, taip talentinga ir sodru. Labai labai patiko.

Edith Wharton’s an eloquent and immaculate writer, her writing knits an emotional tether to the reader, and one intermittently returns to her writing to enjoy thus intellectual companionship.

n  

“Almost everybody in the neighbourhood had ‘troubles,’ frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had ‘complications.’ To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death-warrant. People struggled on for years with ‘troubles,’ but they almost always succumbed to ‘complications.”

“There was no way out—none. He was a prisoner for life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished.”

“If I missed my train where’d I go?’
‘Where are you going if you catch it?”

n